


I Kept Your Secrets, You Tore Me to Pieces

by Emeli_Thorne



Series: Four Walls, Two Wrongs [2]
Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Frank is haunted by memories of his family, Frank teaches Lisa play the guitar, Guilt, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Remorse, TP canon-based, anxiety and depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-14 02:54:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12998277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emeli_Thorne/pseuds/Emeli_Thorne
Summary: A series of oneshots based on flashbacks of Frank and his family from The punisher S1.





	I Kept Your Secrets, You Tore Me to Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Hello fandom :D I decided to write a series of fics based on the flashbacks we got of Frank and his family based on his memories. They will mostly be angsty/fluff and juxtaposed with Frank's current state of mind as it was presented in TP s1. 
> 
> Inspired by canon. Tied to the Part 1 of this series since some of the things mentioned there will be mentioned in Part 2 too.
> 
> This chapter is based on the opening scenes from 1x1 where Frank teaches Lisa play the guitar and when he plays by himself.

He dreams of a bygone Saturday afternoon - a few days after he came back from one of his last tours – and teaching Lisa play the guitar.

Maria told him it was all Lisa talked about for the past few months after she had heard her mom and her friends recalling how she met Frank. Lisa immediately decided she wanted her dad to teach her play the guitar because “it’s one way to have you closer to me when you’re away, daddy”, she told him and his heart shattered in millions of pieces right there and then.

She was so little, so innocent, so unaware of the reality of his job. All she ever wanted was to have her dad beside her, “like other kids”, she told him once. “But I know you have to go fight the bad guys, daddy, so I’m gonna be patient and wait for you to come back. But you have to come back, all right?” Her eyes were unyielding, so stubborn in that moment, practically forcing him to give her the answer she so desperately wanted even thought he knew it was a promise he might break.

Maria told him one night, after they had made love and she was pressed against him with every inch of her silky skin, her slender finger tracing a scar along his pec, that Lisa experienced his absence much deeper than either Frankie or she.

“Sometimes when I get up at night to check on them, I hear her cry, Frank. She says a prayer for your every night before she goes to sleep and every morning before she comes down to have breakfast. Did you know she talks to you?” When he frowned in confusion, Maria smiled weakly and clarified, “That photo of you two on her nightstand? Every night, before the prayer, she sits on her bed, takes it in her hands and tells you all that happened to her that day. Even the smallest of details, she doesn’t leave anything out. It kills me seeing her like that, it kills me even more knowing I can’t do anything to help her.”

He cried in her arms that night, whispered his own doubts and fears in the curve of her neck as she held him tightly, him holding onto her like his mere sanity was depending on it; he laid out his regrets about leaving them to go fight someone else’s war, made promises he knew he couldn’t keep because the ever-present thirst for blood was so much easier to succumb to than to the peace Maria and his children provided.

 _I’m a broken man_ , he thought back then and it hurts to realise how big of a lie it was, how soul-shattering a truth it is now.

That Saturday afternoon, he came into her room, his guitar in hand and the joy he saw on Lisa’s face made him forget all the carnage he left back in Afghanistan. There was only him and his little girl, her small hands on the guitar, eyes squinting in concentration as she tried to hit the right chords. Frank remembers showing off a couple of times, and Lisa’s laughter that rang out in his ears. He remembers how bright her room was that afternoon, casting a soft glow on her cherubic face, and how his heart ached to freeze that moment, to bottle it and hide it somewhere no one can find it and take it away from him.

Her hair was soft under his lips when he kissed the crown of her head; it smelled like strawberries.

He recalls how unabashedly happy he was for that one hour he spent with her, that he never once thought of what was waiting for him when he went back _there._

“Know what?” she asked, after they finished playing.

“What?”

“Frankie has his piano. I can have your guitar. And we can play for you some day, together. Like a mini concert.”

He chuckled, hugging her tightly, “Yeah, baby. I’d like that.”

 

This Saturday evening, as he sits on his tiny and far from comfortable bed, he takes the guitar he found in a pawn shop a few days ago, examining it for a what seems like an eternity. It looks so much like the one he played with Lisa. All shiny, with fiery orange heart and dark surrounding with no visible scratches unlike Lisa’s guitar.

But it weighs wrong. When he plays a few notes, the sounds that it makes pierce his ears – they are so hollow, have no essence, no warmth even though it’s the same tune he used to play with Lisa. 

Frank gives it another try. It’s of no use. It is wrong, everything about it is wrong, everything about him is wrong.

His chest aches, an anvil crushing his lungs, and he can’t breathe.

Darkness surrounds him wherever he looks; he sees no way out. No light.

There are dark circles under his eyes and a pained expression on his face, testaments of his downward spiraling state of mind. He rubs his face with his calloused hands, scratches his head with his to-the-bone-bitten fingernails.

He screams. He screams at the top of his lungs but the sound gets lost in a void, absorbed by it.

His throat is raw, burnt by his unshed tears, his words incoherent. But he knows what he’s screaming even if he can’t hear himself in the delirium he is in: _Lisa. Lisa. Lisa_.

His chest aches, an anvil crushing his lungs, and he can’t breathe.

He is tired, so goddamn tired. 

If only he could rip his heart out, stop feeling all the damn time.

If only he could stop drowning in this despair that has rooted itself in his bones, his flesh, his mind. This despair that is suffocating every even remotely functional part of him. He doubts he can take it much longer.

Ripping his heart out though would mean dying and Frank doesn’t want to die.

No. Dying is easy. Dying means surrender and Frank Castle doesn’t do surrender.

No.

He wishes he could rip his heart out but still breathe.

He wishes for something in between, to not be dead but to not be alive either. He could be walking along the line of those two states, teetering between them but never falling into either of them.

To exist without existing...

Sounds acceptable.

Maybe...

That night, lie so many nights before and after, he ends up sleeping on the concrete floor after a clean pillow and sheets fail to offer him any kind of rest.


End file.
